Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection, [LC-DIG-van-5a52142]
African American Folklorist, Anthropologist, Novelist, and Dramatist
Zora Neale Hurston
(1891–1960)
Zora Neale Hurston was a preeminent African American folklorist, ethnographer, and creative writer of Black life in the U.S. South and Caribbean.
Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, in 1891 to John and Lucy Potts Hurston and raised in Eatonville, Florida—the first incorporated Black town in the United States. She and her siblings attended the Hungerford School in Eatonville and were taught by students of Booker T. Washington. After her mother’s death in 1904, Hurston was forced to move between relatives and friends, an itinerant existence which would persist throughout much of her life. After moving to Baltimore to live with her sister, Hurston graduated from Morgan Academy (high school) in Baltimore (1918) while working as a maid. She then earned an AA degree in English (1920) at Howard University preparatory school, where she studied with Lorenzo Dow Turner and joined Howard’s literary club and Georgia Douglas Johnson’s literary salon, through which she met leading African American writers of the time.
As she gained recognition for her own writing, Hurston transferred to Barnard College as an English major and studied anthropology with Franz Boas. Hurston was the first and only African American student at Barnard that year. Although her education was funded by a scholarship, she could not live on campus due to segregation. While a student, she began collecting folklore of Black life in her home state of Florida. After earning her BA in English (1928), Hurston continued to study with Boas between 1928-1930 as a graduate student at Columbia University, and conducted fieldwork in the Bahamas.
From 1935 through the 1940s, Hurston was the most published Black female author of her time and one of the most prolific and expert ethnographers and scholars of African diasporic folklore. Hurston’s book, Mules and Men (1935), was among the first published folklore collections by a Black author and brought her international acclaim. She wrote plays, novels, short-stories as well as scholarly articles while teaching part time at Bethune-Cookman College. She completed her heralded novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), while conducting fieldwork for the Florida Federal Writers’ Project. Funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship, she researched Black folklore in Jamaica and Haiti. She conducted fieldwork throughout African American communities of the South and Caribbean with a Rosenwald fellowship, and she collaborated with Alan Lomax to collect and document the folk music of Georgia and Florida. She also wrote, staged, and performed several plays out of her ethnographic research for the Federal Theatre Project (1939).
In the 1940s, Hurston taught briefly at small HBCUs. In the 1950s, with failing health, she had to take on odd jobs as she struggled to make ends meet while continuing her writing as well as her research on Black southern and Black Caribbean life.
Hurston received honorary doctorates from Morgan State and Howard Universities and was a member of the American Folklore Society, the American Anthropological Society, the American Ethnological Society, and Zeta Phi Beta. Among her important works:
Mules and Men (1935)
Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Tell My Horse (1938)
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1922. “Journey’s End”. Negro World.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1922. “Night”. Negro World.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1922. “Passion”. Negro World.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1925. “Color Struck.” Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1926. “John Redding goes to Sea – a Story.” Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. V.4 1926, No. 37 p 16-20.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1926. “Muttsy.” Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. V.4 , August p 246-.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1926. Sweat.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1927. The First One. Alexander Street Press.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1928. Zora Neale Hurston Fieldwork Footage. Criterio Collection.
“Hurston, Zora Neale and John Ar. Lynch. 1927. “Communications.” The Journal of Negro History. Vol. 12, No. 4 (Oct., 1927), pp. 664-669, published by The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1927. “Cudjo’s Own Story of the Last African Slaver.” The Journal of Negro History. Vol. 12, No. 4 (Oct., 1927), pp. 648-663.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1928. “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” Applewood Books.
“Hurston, Zora Neale. 1930. “Dance Songs and Tales from the Bahamas.” The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 43, No. 169 (Jul. – Sep., 1930), pp. 294-312.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1931. “Hoodoo in America.” The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 44, No. 174 (Oct. – Dec., 1931), pp. 317-417.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1933. “The Gilded Six-Bits.” Redpath Press.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1934 [1990]. Jonah’s Gourd Vine. New York, N.Y.: Perennial Library.
“Hurston, Zora Neale. 1934 [1994]. “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. Edited by Angelyn Mitchell. Published by: Duke University Press (pp. 79-94).
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1935. Mules and Men. New York: Perennial Library.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1937. Their Eyes Were Watching God. J.B. lippincott Company.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1938. Tell My Horse. New York: Perennial Library.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1938. Moses Man of the Mountain. Harper Perennial.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1942 [2010]. Dust Tracks on a Road. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1942. “Crazy for This Democracy.” Negro Digest. Reprint: Available Means: An Anthology Of Women’s Rhetoric(s). Ed. Joy Ritchie Kate Ronald 2001 University of Pittsburgh Press, pp 248-251.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1948. Seraph on the Suwanee. HarperPerennial.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1950. “What White Publishers Won’t Print.” Negro Digest. Copy in: African American Literary Theory: A Reader (Ed. Winston Napier) 2000.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1979. I Love Myself When I Am Laughing… and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader. Alice Walker, ed. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1981. The Sanctified Church. Berkeley : Turtle Island.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1985. Spunk: Selected Stories. Berkeley: Turtle Island Foundation.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1991. Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life. New York, NY : HarperPerennial.
“Hurston, Zora Neale. 1991. “Florida’s Migrant Farm Labor.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. Published by: University of Nebraska Press. Vol. 12, No. 1 (1991), pp. 199-203.
Hurston, Zora Neale and Gail Garfield. 1991. “I SHALL WRASSLE ME UP A FUTURE OR DIE TRYING.” Dialectical Anthropology. Published by: Springer. Vol. 16, No. 2 (1991), pp. 139-151.
“Hurston, Zora Neale. 1991. “Folklore and Music.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. Published by University of Nebraska Press. Vol. 12, No. 1 (1991), pp. 182-198.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1995. The Complete Stories. Introduction by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sieglinde Lemke. New York : HarperCollins.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1995. Novels & Stories: Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Moses, Man of the Mountain, Seraph on the Suwanee, Selected Stories. New York, N.Y. : Literary Classics of the United States.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1995. Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings: Mules and Men, Tell My Horse, Dust Tracks on a Road, Selected Articles. New York : The Library of America.
“Hurston, Zora Neale and W. Elizabeth Roberson. 1999. “Grave Matters.” Southern Cultures. Published by University of North Carolina Press. Vol. 5, No. 3 (FALL 1999), pp. 99-102.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 2001. Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States. New York: HarperCollins.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 2002. “Zora, O Zora!: A Celebration of the Work of Zora Neale Hurston.” Black Camera. Published by Indiana University Press. Vol. 17, No. 2 (Fall/Winter, 2002), p. 8.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 2002. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, collected and edited by Carla Kaplan. New York: Doubleday.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 2008. Collected Plays. Rutgers University Press.
Hurston, Zora Neale and Carla Cappetti. 2010. “Defending Hurston against Her Legend: Two Previously Unpublished Letters.” Amerikastudien / American Studies. Vol. 55, No. 4, African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges (2010), pp. 602-614. “
Hurston, Zora Neale. 2010. “Monkey Junk.” Amerikastudien / American Studies. Vol. 55, No. 4, African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges (2010), pp. 570-575.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 2010. “She Rock.” Amerikastudien / American Studies. Vol. 55, No. 4, African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges (2010), pp. 592-597.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 2010. “The Back Room.” Amerikastudien / American Studies. Vol. 55, No. 4, African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges (2010), pp. 576-581.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 2010. “The Book of Harlem.” Amerikastudien / American Studies. Vol. 55, No. 4, African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges (2010), pp. 566-569.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 2010. “The Country in the Woman.” Amerikastudien / American Studies. Vol. 55, No. 4, African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges, pp. 587-591.
“Hurston, Zora Neale. 2011. “from ‘Herod the Great’.” Callaloo. Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Vol. 34, No. 1 (Winter, 2011), pp. 121-125.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 2018. Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”. HarperCollins.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 2019. High John de Conquer. Wildside Press LLC.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 2020. Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance. Zora Neal Hurston Trust.